Facebook Gets Flowery for Mother's Day

One of the benefits of Facebook's new replacement/enhancement of the like button is that if the mood strikes them, they can add new 'reactions', either temporarily or permanently. Typically, when Facebook do throw in some minor new aesthetic change or feature, it's a short term deal brought on by a particular day or event.

In this case, it was Mother's Day (the American one, anyway, we had ours back in March). On May 8th, users in the pertinent areas found that there was a new string to their reaction bow - 'thankful'. It's represented by a purple flower, making it the only symbol apart from 'like' that isn't a face, or a healthy face, at least.

The idea is that people would use the thankful reaction on posts related to their mothers, and the day in general, but unsurprisingly, people soon started using it everywhere, either because it applies or just because they can. Well, theycould, but the option vanished just as soon as the day itself did, the only remaining evidence that it ever existed being all the posts people used it on.

Don't despair though, temporary or post specific reactions are likely to appear more and more frequently as the service matures. This could extend to branded content, it's easy to imagine Coke bringing in an exclusive 'refreshed' button which only appears on content with their name tagged in it, for example. Let's just hope that, in situations similar to this, people don't start using them as a cop out in the way they have with birthday wall posts.